A Note on the National Plan on Aging
A national plan on aging is only as good as the framework that guides it. In September 2024, responding to a call for public input from the Interagency Coordinating Committee on Healthy Aging and Age-Friendly Communities, this author submitted recommendations on the federal governments Strategic Framework for a National Plan on Aging. The submission argued that the Framework, while commendable in its ambitions and its cross-cutting values of person-centeredness, inclusion, and respect, was operating without a sufficiently robust analytical framework of its own — one capable of mapping the interconnected domains it identified, measuring progress toward its goals, and accounting for the social and psychological forces that shape how aging is understood and experienced in the United States.
Central to the submission was the argument that framing is not a communication strategy but a foundational determinant of policy effectiveness. Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, Carol Dweck, and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein — on frame analysis, growth mindset, and nudge theory respectively — the submission proposed that the Framework would benefit from a more rigorous engagement with how Americans think about aging, and how those patterns of thought could be shifted.
Of particular concern was the treatment of ageism. The World Health Organization ranked ageism as the highest-priority challenge in addressing elder abuse globally — yet the submission argued that the elder justice field's approach has been too narrow, too reactive, and too exclusively focused on older adults as victims rather than on the lifelong, cumulative, and intersectional nature of age-based prejudice. Ageism does not begin at sixty-five. It begins at birth, is reinforced throughout the life course, and arrives in late life carrying decades of accumulated weight. A national plan on aging that does not reckon with that full arc will address symptoms without touching causes.
The assessment proceeds in eight parts.
Part 1: The Framework Problem The Strategic Framework has the right values and the wrong tools — a vision without the analytical scaffolding to realize it.
Part 2: What a Framework Actually Is Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s SOCIAL model illustrates what a robust analytical framework looks like — and why aging, as a wicked problem, requires one.
Part 3: The Frame Behind the Framework How we think about aging shapes what a national plan can achieve — and Erving Goffman’s frame analysis explains why changing that thinking is harder than providing better information.
Part 4: When the Frame Changes Becca Levy and Martin Slade’s landmark 2026 research demonstrates that the frames we hold about aging have measurable biological consequences — and that they can be changed.
Part 5: A Crisis in Plain Sight Elder abuse affects an estimated one in ten older Americans — and the field’s most powerful tool for addressing it has been ranked eleventh on its own priority list.
Part 6: Ageism Reframed Ageism is the field's highest-ranked priority — but the version of it the field has been addressing may itself be part of the problem.
Part 7: Public Health and Human Rights Elder justice needs both frameworks — and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities names the standard neither has yet fully met.
Part 8: Toward a National Plan That Works Five specific recommendations — and the one indicator the field has been most reluctant to name as the measure of whether the plan is working.
Adapted from a formal survey response to the Administration for Community Living call for public input, "Input Needed to Support Development of National Plan on Aging," September 15, 2024. Philip C. Marshall is the founder of BeyondBrooke.org.